NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Kids who live in neighborhoods
with heavy traffic pollution have lower IQs and score worse on
other tests of intelligence and memory than children who
breathe cleaner air, a new study shows.

The effect of pollution on intelligence was similar to that
seen in children whose mothers smoked 10 cigarettes a day while
pregnant, or in kids who have been exposed to lead, Dr. Shakira
Franco Suglia of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston,
the study's lead author, told Reuters Health.

While the effect of pollution on cardiovascular and
respiratory health has been studied extensively, less is known
about how breathing dirty air might affect the brain, Suglia
and her team write in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

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To investigate, she and her colleagues looked at 202 Boston
children 8 to 11 years old who were participating in a study of
maternal smoking. The researchers related several measures of
cognitive function to the children's estimated exposure to
black carbon, a component of the particulate matter emitted in
automobile and truck exhaust, particularly by diesel vehicles.

The more heavily exposed children were to black carbon, the
lower were their scores on several intelligence tests.

When the researchers adjusted for the effects of parents'
education, language spoken at home, birth weight, and exposure
to tobacco smoke, the association remained.

For example, heavy exposure to black carbon was linked to a
3.4-point drop in IQ, on average. Heavily exposed children also
scored lower on tests of vocabulary, memory and learning.

"It's within the range for in utero tobacco exposure and
lead exposure," Suglia said in an interview.

She pointed out that exposure to traffic pollution has been
associated with a number of other harmful effects and that,
short of moving away from heavy traffic areas, there's not much
people can do to limit it.

She and her colleagues suggest that traffic pollution may
exert harmful effects by causing inflammation and oxidative
damage to the brain. They call for further research on the
effects of pollution on the development of intelligence in
children and on cognitive decline for people of all ages,
including whether traffic exposure might cause or accelerate
brain degeneration in conditions such as Alzheimer's disease
and Parkinson's disease.